Obama unveils 'Organizing for Action'

President Barack Obama on Friday announced the relaunch of his remaining campaign apparatus as a new tax-exempt group called Organizing for Action that will “play an active role” in “mobilizing around and speaking out in support of important legislation” during his second term.

“We may have started this as a longshot presidential primary campaign in 2007, but it’s always been about more than just winning an election. Together, we’ve made our communities stronger, we’ve fought for historic legislation, and we’ve brought more people than ever before into the political process,” Obama wrote in an email to supporters. “Organizing for Action will be a permanent commitment to this mission.”

“We’ve got to keep working on growing the economy from the middle out, along with making meaningful progress on the issues we care about — immigration reform, climate change, balanced deficit reduction, reducing gun violence, and the implementation of the Affordable Care Act,” Obama wrote. “I’m not going to be able to take them on without you.”

Organizing for Action will be separate from the Democratic National Committee, with Obama’s 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina serving as the national chairman of the group.

The group’s board will include a host of former Obama staffers, an Obama campaign aide said Friday. Along with Messina will be Obama campaign and White House alumni Stephanie Cutter, Robert Gibbs, Jennifer O’Malley-Dillon, Julianna Smoot and Erik Smith. Senior adviser David Plouffe will also join when he leaves the White House later this month.

Obama’s email includes a link to a video of Michelle Obama stressing the importance of Obama campaign volunteers continuing to work to support the president’s agenda.

“If we want to finish what we started and truly make that change we can believe in, we can’t stop now,” she says in the video. “Supporters like you will be the heart of this organization.”

Messina says that he will be intimitely involved in directing the new organization to back Obama during the second term.

“It will be a supporter-driven organization, as we’ve always been, staying true to our core principles: ‘respect, empower, include,’” Messina wrote to supporters in an email shortly after midnight Friday. “We’ll work on the key battles of our generation, train the next generation of grassroots organizers and leaders, and organize around local issues in our own communities. We’ll continue to support the president in creating jobs and growing the economy from the middle out, and in fighting for issues like immigration reform, climate change, balanced deficit reduction, and reducing gun violence.”

The effort will begin on Sunday, the day the president is formally sworn in to his second term, as Obama campaign staff and volunteers gather at the Washington Hilton for an event dubbed the Obama Legacy Conference.

“We have a remarkable opportunity right now to change our country, and if we can take the enthusiasm and passion that people showed throughout the campaign and channel it into the work ahead of us, we will be unstoppable,” he wrote. “As the chair of Organizing for Action, I will be deeply involved in this new organization, but it will be organizers like you who will determine where it goes. I have no doubt we can take this grassroots movement to new and extraordinary heights.”

The formation of the group will make Messina the de facto political director for Obama, and is an implicit rejection of DNC Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, an Obama outsider not close to the president, as the party’s operational leader.